Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Today, I got my Dell D7 laptop back from repairs. They replaced the following:

• Battery (cost extra because it's not a warranty item)


• Fan (which was the original issue)


• Heatsink (probably a good idea given how hot the machine was getting)


• Palmrest (including the touchpad, which had been pushed out of shape by the swollen battery)

After first testing that the computer would boot properly when not connected to anything including ground power, I cleaned up the area around where it sits on my desk (lots of vacuuming), reconnected everything, and started things up. Everything worked, aside from a few minor things that needed tweaking. There were a whole lot of updates to install on account of the machine having been offline for weeks. I moved my Quicken files back to my personal machine (that took quite a while). Then it was time to start working on the project backlog.

The 2024 Saturday WSFS Business Meeting uploaded to my account (not the official version created by the Business Meeting, but Lisa's recording) has had a strange glitch in it that caused the audio and video to get out of sync around 1h 17m. I launched Adobe Premiere and brought up the original file, which merges the nine original files. The glitch isn't in the original. I can't figure out why it happened in the first place. All I could do was generate a new "version 2" of the Saturday meeting, which took several hours. The source files total 25.7 GB. The compiled file is only 5.4 GB.

The compiled file doesn't have the glitch in it, so I uploaded it to my YouTube channel. As I write this, it says that it will be several hours before it finishes processing the uploaded file. Even with my decent upload speed (around 20 mbps), it takes a long time to upload these files, and large files like this require lots of processing time by YouTube. If you subscribe to my YouTube Channel, you can get notified when new files, including this Saturday Version 2 file, is live.

Tomorrow, we'll find out if Version 2 doesn't have the glitch. If it does not, then I can move on to the last of the editing jobs of the 2024 Business Meeting, which is combining the eight segments of the Monday Meeting into a single file, which again will be much smaller than the individual files off the camera. Once again, this won't happen quickly; however, I will post when the file is live on YouTube.

As some of you may recall, my computer started making unhappy fan noises during the Worldcon trip (starting in Iceland) and then would not boot at all. Dell tech support got it so it would boot again, but several days later, and agreed that they would repair it under the extended-warranty plan for which I'm paying, but that I'd have to send it back to them from within the USA. So I struggled along for a few more days, but at one point the computer seemed to quit completely. This means I couldn't do the edits to take the raw Business Meeting video from the final day, stitch the large files together, then compile it down to a single smaller file. I gave up and didn't try to start the computer again until after I got home.

It's a good thing that we already had a finished episode of Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories complete and uploaded for posting at the start of September, because I would not have been able to edit and upload one in August. Even if I had a finished episode, I wouldn't have been able to upload it from my work computer, because while I can watch YouTube videos on it, I can neither see or make comments, nor can I upload videos, as part of the company's policies. It's their machine and their rules, and I'm not complaining. Oddly enough, they don't prohibit me posting photos (or video) to my Flickr account, which is good because I uploaded more than a thousand photos during the trip, and shared some of them with my co-workers (who didn't complain, other than to express envy) while I was working remotely during the trip.

A few days ago, I contacted Dell, who re-opened the case about my computer. We did managed to get the machine to boot, which was a relief because it seems I didn't fry the processor after all. However, the fan is still giving trouble. There's a separate issue about the touchpad I'd forgotten to raise with them, but we went through the tests and they agreed that something was wrong there. Since I have to send it for repair anyway, it's another thing than they can check.

Dell support sent me a prepaid FedEx Priority Overnight shipping box, which I received yesterday on my way back from the Urgent Care center. I packaged up the computer and power supply and took it over to the office-supply store that is the FedEx shipping point in Fernley. As it happens, I had to go back over to that shopping center, which includes Renown Urgent Care, because I'd left my reusable mug in the examination room. To my relief, the mug was sitting at the front desk. I then dropped off the computer. It was before the FedEx pickup time, so it should be in Dell's hand's by Monday. It should take around a week for them to work on it and return it to me. With luck, it will be back in time for me to edit the October RLMS. I also plan to edit together a single, smaller file of the final day of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting.

As it turns out, the new monitors can either have higher resolution at a 30 Hz refresh rate, or a lower resolution at a 60 Hz refresh rate. This appears to be a limitation of the monitor drivers on both my work and personal computers. To see if it makes a difference, I've set the shared monitor to the lower res/faster refresh rate for the work machine and to higher res/lower refresh rate for the personal computer.

I have a feeling that I will end up with higher res/lower refresh rate for both machines, because I don't think I need the higher refresh rate for spreadsheets or even video editing, while the higher resolution, even at the lower refresh rate, seems like it would be better for both.

Friday evening after dinner, Lisa asked me to clone one of her hard drives. While that was running, we went down to the Fernley Nugget casino and Lisa played slots for a while. We came within sixty cents of triggering a bonus coupon that would have gotten us an extra $10 free play, but close isn't good enough. However, we left with the same amount of money as we started with, and had a bit of entertainment along the way (and a couple of free drinks). Alas, when we got home, we found that the clone had failed, so the rest of the evening was spent trying to troubleshoot the issue, without success. The source drive works, but something about it causes the cloning software to choke. Darn.

This afternoon, when I started my computer, it went into the Windows Recovery Console. This happened just over a year ago, while coming back home from Southern California, and I had no recourse; my machine was offline for days while the IT team worked on it at Day Jobbe. This time, at least, I had a system image, albeit that the last image was taken on November 18, more than a month ago. I plugged in the external hard drive with the image and set it to restoring, and then Lisa and I took the minivan in to Sparks.

In Sparks, we went to Jiffy Lube, where we had "the works:" oil change, coolant flush and refill, fuel filter, rear differential, and several other services. The first was overdue (and we'd been down a quart of oil on the way back from Texas), the second was because of the replacement heater hose, and the others were due to be done anyway. When Lisa and I came back from walking down to Pizza Hut and having a pizza there, the van was ready to go and all was well. The temperature still reads a little higher than I would like, but it may have been doing that anyway and I didn't notice.

When we got home, the computer was waiting for me to log in normally, and booted just fine, albeit that the last six weeks' worth of files are gone. Fortunately, most of these are backed up elsewhere, and other can be recreated if necessary. The SMOFCon videos are up on YouTube, and the source files are still on Lisa's camera, but the editing I did to create the former from the latter is gone.

The irony to me is that I'd intended to do a system image last night, but I was so tired that I quit without setting it up. I don't know if that's bad or good. If whatever caused my computer to die was already there last night, a new system image would have been hosed as well.

Now I have to look at other backups to try and recover such data as I can.

Lisa and I went back into Reno last night, first to have dinner at the Nugget and get our entries for the 11 PM drawing activated, then to go shopping, then to return to the Nugget for the drawing itself. Our slot machine luck finally caught up with us, but I ended up winning $20 at video blackjack and Lisa got a nice payout from the Batman machine just before the 11 PM drawing, so the net effect was only to be down about $3 or so for the night. I suggested that Kuma Bear, our mascot and good luck charm, wasn't really on his game last night. I said to Lisa, "He must a bit hung over from having too many Salmon Shooters."

We didn't win the $10,000, although the odds were much better last night than on New Year's Eve since there were far fewer people there. Once again the first name drawn didn't show up, but the second one did. The drawing was conducted by the man we call "The Prize Guy," and he's come to recognize us, too. (Lisa and Kuma Bear are memorable.) Last night's drawing was made by Stephen Ascuaga, son of the Nugget's founder, John Ascuaga and COO of the hotel. After the drawing, while I cashed in the winning voucher from Lisa's win on Batman, Lisa took the chance to brace up Mr. Ascuaga and praise his casino-resort, which he seemed to appreciate.

We returned home to Fernley and I got online and ran through messages. After a little while, boxes popped up that claimed that "Your computer is infected with spyware! Scan with XP Antispyware 2012 now!" The windows were acting like the XP Security suite, but I could see that they weren't quite what they claimed to be. OTOH, I couldn't see how to get rid of them. Fortunately, my other computer was working, and it didn't take much searching to find references to the XP Security 2012 virus and instructions from answers.microsoft.com and bleepingcomputer.com on how to get rid of it. It's a little time-consuming because you first have to run a program to stop the immediate problem (the virus inserts itself in such a way that it runs itself instead of any EXE file you select), then (without rebooting, since that would reactivate the virus), download and run MalwareBytes and do a full system scan. I left that scan running and went to bed. This morning, I finished the virus removal (the scan took hours) and my machine seems back to normal. Good thing I have two working computers here!

(The personal D600 dell seems to be behaving itself now that I've put the system files on a smaller partition, so the "137 GB problem" isn't raising its head. I hope.)